Saturday, January 13, 2007

Things the Globe and Mail missed

I finally finished reading the Globe and Mail's Kids Today article (Don't know how long until it is put behind the firewall), and I noticed there are quite a few salient points they didn't mention at all.

- They present adult children living with their parents as pure laziness on the part of the kids. They never mentioned that sometimes parents want their kids to live at home. When I was starting university (at 18), my family considered it irresponsible for me to move out and live in res instead of continuing to live at home to save money). Some of my peers have families that consider it irresponsible to move out and rent rather than living at home until they save up a downpayment. (I was once in a training with some people from another department, and some older ladies I'd just met were lecturing me for throwing money away by living on my own.) I know other families that expect their kids to live with their parents until marriage, and still other families where all parties simply prefer living together because they don't like living alone.

- They don't even mention the role of employment insecurity in all this. The article seems to assume that because the economy is good on paper, anyone can just go out and get a nice secure full-time job whenever the hell they want, and not doing so is due entirely to laziness. They completely ignore the fact that even if economic indicators are good, more and more jobs today are insecure, term or contract positions, increasingly low-paid and without pension or benefits. Jobs for life stopped existing in the 90s. This has the dual effect of a) making it riskier for people to move out of their parents' (would you move out and sign a one-year lease if your job was just a three-month contract?) and b) giving people fewer reasons to stay in whatever job they have (imagine, in the first person, the difference between quitting a job with benefits, disability, and a pension because it sucks, and quitting a job with no benefits whatsoever because it sucks).

- The article briefly mentions that even in adolescence, Kids Today are generally more dependent on their parents, but it fails to mention the role of suburban sprawl in this. With suburban sprawl, kids have to be driven everywhere. There's no choice, because there's insufficient public transit and walking is too far and not really safe. In the 1990s, with the introduction of graduated licencing, the minimum age at which one could drive alone was raised to 16 years and 8 months with driver's ed or 17 years without, and a few years ago Grade 13/OAC was eliminated, so kids now spend only four years in high school. The result of these two changes is that, compared with previous generations, suburban kids necessarily spend the majority of their high-school years dependent on their parents to drive them around, which changes the whole dynamic of high school compared with when OAC was still around, when the majority of high school kids were old enough to drive alone, and before graduated licencing, where even the oldest Grade 10 students could drive alone. Understand, however, that even though kids are old enough to drive alone, that doesn't mean they can. The family might not have enough cars for the kid to drive to school or work or a friend's house, so a parent might have to drop them off and bring the car back home for someone else to use. Or the parents may not approve of the kid having their own car and thus forbid the kid to even buy a car with their own money. (I've even heard of some parents who deliberately prevent their kids from having a car - or even for learning to drive - so they can better monitor their comings and goings.) Also, the shorter driving-in-high-school time makes it less cost-effective to buy a car for the kid's use in high school, (whether the kid buys it themselves or the parents buy it), because most people don't take their cars to university with them. Before graduated licencing and before OAC was removed, the oldest kids in the year could start driving halfway through grade 10, and drive until the end of the summer after Grade 13, when they'd go away to school. Now, the oldest kids can start driving alone at the beginning of Grade 11 if they've done driver's ed, and can use that car until the end of the summer after Grade 12, when they go away to school. Every time that an adolescent has to ask their parents for a ride because there's no way for them to get from Point A to Point B independently is one missed opportunity for increasing their independence. This influences every single person who grows up in suburban and rural areas, but the article doesn't mention it at all.

- In the print edition, there's a blurb saying "Do you know of any young people who aren't making what they could of their lives? Please share your stories at globeandmail.com." That's a very strange thing to say. "Not making what they could of their lives." Guess what? You're not making what you could of your life! You could be a lumberjack! (If you are a lumberjack, you could be a barber! (If you are both a barber and a lumberjack, please post in the comments - I want to meet you!)) Me, I could be a nun or a lawyer or a trophy wife. But instead I'm a translator, to which I'm much better suited. However, I'm sure that there is someone out there somewhere who thinks I would be better off as a nun, and someone else who thinks I would be better off as a lawyer, and another someone else who thinks I would be better off as a trophy wife. But that doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with how I'm living my life now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Interesting contrasts (and some parallels) between this series and a recent one in USA Today.

Instead of 'underachievers' who don't launch, USA Today focused on five who went on to school and now are deep in debt at young ages.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/credit/young-debt-digest.htm